The Louvre museum in Paris said on Friday that it has put almost half a million items from its collection online for the public to visit for free.
As part of a major renovation of its online presence, the most visited museum in the world has created a new database of 482,000 items on Collections.louvre.fr with more than three quarters already tagged with information and images.
It comes after a year of pandemic-related outages, which sparked an explosion in visits to its main website, louvre.fr, which has also undergone a major overhaul.
“It is a stage that has been prepared for several years with the aim of serving the general public and researchers as well. Accessibility is at the heart of our mission, ”said CEO Jean-Luc Martinez.
The new database includes not only items on public display in the museum, but also those in storage, including in its new state-of-the-art facilities in Lievin, in northern France.
The platform also includes the Delacroix museum, which is run by the Louvre, as well as sculptures from the neighboring Tuileries gardens and works recovered from Germany since the end of the war in 1945 that are waiting to be restored for the families from which they were looted.
The museum announced earlier this month that it would step up its efforts to restore items stolen from Jewish families by the Nazi regime.
It is working to complete the verification of all 13,943 items purchased between 1933 and 1945, a process it expects to complete in five years, to be followed by investigations into the works acquired in the subsequent decades.
Martinez estimated that about one percent of the portraits in the collections were looted.
“The Louvre has nothing to hide and the risk of reputation is enormous,” he said. “When the next generations want to know where these collections came from, how do we react? Doing the historical work and establishing the facts.”
jlv / er / jz